How unlike the home life...

It's spring. There are all sorts of very subtle clues out there -- flowers blooming, incipient leaves, basking cat -- but the infallible proof is also upon us, and we are once again deluged by ladybirds. They have wintered somewhere abutting the walls of our bedroom and are now waking to enjoy the new season. In large numbers. I seem to spend half my life rescuing them from daft places and putting them out through the windows. The cats, of course, love this -- the human is hunting! we must help! -- and rush to my aid, convinced not only of my incompetence, but of the utter desirability of getting outside through a window. All of which is, naturally, deeply useful (it's a third storey window, Ish. No way can you get anywhere from it.)
The ladybirds are the Wrong king, the invasive species and I suppose really I should be hard on them. But the fact is that I'm soft.
A local butcher meanwhile is marketing meat from Red Poll cattle. These are probably the bullocks I inspected in the autumn, and I'm sad. They were sweet creatures. I am not fit to survive, I'm really not.
Meanwhile, Grass King is behaving, more or less -- more words, less sensation of pulling teeth or mining treacle and we have the lovely anna_wing coming round this evening. And tomorrow I have my first ever official speaking engagement as a writer of fiction, to the writing club at bf Corvidae's school.